And Jericho sat, with his heart beating the faster. Again, he placed his hand to his breast; again drew forth another Bank note. He jumped to his feet; tore away his dress, and running to a mirror, saw therein reflected, not human flesh; but over the region of his heart a loose skin of Bank paper, veined with marks of ink. He touched it; and still in his hand there lay another note!
His thoughtless wish had been wrought into reality. Solomon Jericho was, in very truth, a Man made of Money.
CHAPTER V.
Jogtrot Hall was the one central grandeur, the boast and the comfort of Marigolds; a village, it may be, overlooked, unknown to the town reader, although so near to London, that on soft, calm nights, with the light wind setting from the east, it is said the late villager has heard the bell of St. Paul’s humming of the huge city in the deep quietude of starlit fields. As yet, the iron arms of the rail had not clipped Marigolds close to London. As yet, it lay some two hours’ distant—reckoning the time by coach-horses. Therefore, it was a day of wondrous promise to the villagers, when Squire Carraways threw open the Hall to his London friends. All Marigolds glowed with satisfaction, for the Hall was as the heart of the village; its influence felt, acknowledged at the farthest extremity. In fact, Squire Carraways was the feudal sovereign (he had, without knowing it, so crowned himself) of the people of Marigolds. He lorded it over every fireside; with the like power, if not with the like means, of the good old blade-and-buckler generations.
Conceive Jogtrot Hall to be the awful castle of the domain; though, to say the truth, there was not a frown to be got from it, see it as you would. For the architects, in their various tasks undertaken from time to time, had made the Hall a sort of brick-and-mortar joke; a violation and a burlesque of all building. The Hall was a huge jumble; here adorned with large beauty spots of lichen; there with ivy; here with jasmine and roses; and, to be short, with a very numerous family of flowering parasites, sticking and clinging, and creeping everywhere about it. The Hall seemed to have been built bit by bit as its owners got the wherewithal: as though, only when fortune had made a good venture, the owner permitted himself to send out for additional bricks and mortar. The Hall covered, or to speak better, sprawled over half an acre of ground. And as it lay tumbled on the greensward, dressed with all coloured plants and flowers; as its fifty windows stared, and peeped, and looked archly at you, it puzzled you which room to choose wherein to set your easy chair, and, with the fitting accessaries, therein to take a long, deep pull of blessed leisure.
And the lord of the Hall—Gilbert Carraways, merchant—had a high and dignified sense of his station. He had, perhaps, his own notions of feudality; but such as they were, he vindicated and worked them out with a truly Saxon energy. In the first place, he hated a beggar: he had, it would almost seem, an inborn horror of a destitute man: therefore, he never permitted any misery soever—we mean the misery of want—to find harbourage in Marigolds. If, in his walks, he met with a strange starving vagrant, crawling his way to hungry death, he would immediately take up the offender, and giving strictest orders that the vagabond should be well looked after, that is fed—and with amended covering, and a shilling in his pocket, be sent forth rebuked upon his journey. As for the vassals, or villagers, the Lord of the Hall knew every man, woman, and child; and at certain times, would call them to strict account. He would so carry it even in their homes, that he knew—as winter came—how many blankets were in every cottage, what logs of wood, and what store of coals. He would moreover busy himself with the meanest circumstances of the meanest mortality; for example, in such mishaps as the death of a cow, a horse, nay, even pigs, when the property of a labouring villager. He would thereupon resolve himself into a jury of inquiry; and satisfied with the evidence, would replace the cow, give another horse, send a pig or two from his own store. Moreover, this lord in the deep vaults of his Hall had captives buried from the light for ten and twenty years: and these at Christmas and at holiday times he would set free for the especial merriment of the folk of Marigolds.
Jogtrot Hall was partly surrounded by an advance guard of magnificent elms: huge, sturdy timber, with the wrinkles of some two hundred years in their bark; but green and flourishing, and alive and noisy with a colony of rooks, the descendants of a long flight of undisturbed ancestry. Between the elms, and lifted on a gentle rise of ground, Jogtrot Hall looked down with smiling, hospitable face. There was no rampant lion over the gates; no eagle, ready to swoop upon the new-comer. You approached the door through a double hedge of holly, winding up the slope; a double line of green-liveried guards bristling and berried. Two peacocks cut in yew—the bird crest of former occupants—were perched at the upper end on either side. Their condition, in the midst of flourishing beauty, gave warning of its fleetness. They were fast withering. One bird was dying from the head; the other from the tail; they looked forlorn and blighted; an eyesore amidst health and freshness. Nevertheless, Carraways would not suffer them to be cut down. “In the first place,” he would say, “it would be a mean act towards those who had lived there before him: to the original owners of the peacocks. And secondly, in the sunniest seasons the dying birds preached a sermon, nothing the less solemn because to a rustling, fine-dressed congregation of leaves and flowers.”
Now, whatever discourse the peacocks may have held to the master of the domain, we have no belief that the dying preachers will obtain a moment’s attention from the crowd of visitors now on their way from London, to eat and drink, and dance and sing, and to act love and to make enmity, to embrace one another, and to pick one another to pieces, for half-a-day’s happiness at Jogtrot Hall. Family parties, gatherings of friends and acquaintances came with every week to the house; but this was a day special—a day set apart for the reception of a multitude. Never, since Carraways had come down to the village, had Marigolds been so roused. The day was, we say, a general festival. All the folks were in their best; and the schoolmaster and schoolmistress—both functionaries paid from the privy purse of Jogtrot Hall—gave their boys and girls a holiday, that, in their cleanest attire, and with big nosegays stuck in their bosoms and held in their hands, they might, as small retainers of the Lord of the Hall, do honour to him and pleasure to themselves.